Steven McIntoshEntertainment reporter
Writer Jack Thorne has praised the “remarkable” journalists who exposed the use of phone hacking in some parts of the media, ahead of a new TV series about the scandal.
ITV’s forthcoming drama The Hack stars David Tennant as Nick Davies, the investigative Guardian reporter who exposed the extent of hacking at Sunday tabloid the News of the World.
Thorne, who also wrote Netflix hit Adolescence, told Radio 4’s Today: “I thought I knew this as a story, I thought it was a story about journalists behaving badly, I thought the story started and ended with that.
“But actually… you see it’s a lot more than that. It’s a relationship between the press, politics and the police that’s really troubling. And what we try to do in this show is uncover the detail of that.”
The News of the World was closed down in 2011, after it emerged journalists at the paper had hacked phones of public figures in an effort to obtain exclusive stories.
Davies published several stories about phone hacking throughout the scandal, but public outrage reached a new level when it came to light that murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s voicemails were among those which had been hacked, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive.
For the ITV dramatisation of the scandal, Thorne has collaborated with some of the same team who made the hugely successful Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
“The difference between this and Mr Bates, which I think is really fascinating, is that Mr Bates was about the fact that journalism couldn’t get purchase on this,” Thorne told presenter Justin Webb.
Several journalists working for outlets including Computer Weekly, Private Eye and the covered the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, but the story cut through to the public in a much bigger way after ITV’s dramatisation aired in January 2024.
“There were brilliant journalists doing amazing work in the post office case,” Thorne said, “but in this case, this is a celebration of brilliant journalists who actually managed to call their own industry to account.
“And I’ve thought a lot about that when working on this,” he continued. “I think that I am instinctively a coward when it comes to looking at problems and calling out things within my own industry.
“The brilliance of these people [the journalists who exposed phone hacking]… to look at what’s happening within the media sphere, and to do damage to that industry, is quite remarkable.”
The Hack tells the story from two different points of view – that of Davies, as the journalist reporting on it, and police detective Dave Cook (played by Robert Carlyle), who investigated the murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.
Tennant is one of more than 1,600 celebrities and other public figures to have settled out of court with News Group Newspapers, the publishers of the News of the World, over the phone hacking scandal.
The launch of The Hack comes after another of Thorne’s TV dramas, Adolescence, dominated the Emmy Awards earlier this month.
The series, co-created by actor Stephen Graham, told the story of a schoolboy named Jamie Miller accused of murdering a female classmate, and explored the impact of smartphones and social media on teenagers.
Asked if there would be a follow-up, Thorne said: “Certainly not a sequel, I think we’ve told the Miller story as well as we possibly can.
“We might, well we’re trying, Stephen [Graham] and I are trying, to write something which uses the same techniques, works with the same group of people, to shed light on a different aspect of our society.”
The Hack begins on Wednesday 24 September at 21:00 BST on ITV1 and ITVX
